Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  He walked and came to the disused elevated rail line he had noticed before. A billboard on the bridge bore the legend: COLLECTORS WANT TO BE DEALERS, DEALERS HOPE TO BE STARS, AND CURATORS DREAM TO BE ARTISTS. Patrick Mimran.

  Finn noticed the nodding grass heads above the billboard, which swayed in the glow of streetlights on Tenth Avenue. He followed the rail line north, walking beneath it and alongside it, pursuing the promise of something he might understand, the presence of something rural insinuated by the stalks. He entered a goods yard where the night lay soft above a confluence of rail tracks that reflected the lit orange sky and bled corrosion into the dark ground. Finn knew there had to be people here somewhere but was propelled forward by the same nervous exploration that had taken him down into the quarries and up into the treetops of Sussex as a boy, in a perpetual quest for a corner of the world he could kid himself had not been discovered or that here, in the overbuilt city, might have been forgotten. On the far side of the goods yard, iron stairs rose to the elevated line, and he clambered up on to it, placing his feet on the most solid parts of the condemned steps, ignoring the KEEP OUT signs and the gaps where the metal had disintegrated.

  Manhattan offered him new variations on solitude, and this was the best yet. The rooftop water towers gathered like crows on the skyline, and watched the little lost English boy pick his way through the rust meadow, every cell of his body more at home for smelling the weeds and for feeling the drag of long grass. He had walked railways before, played chicken on the main line with lads from the estate, and in this place, abandoned, gone to seed, Finn could imagine remaining.

  In a scrapyard beneath him, colossal iron girders lay discarded like pick-up-sticks in a giant’s play pen. Around him, sumac had sprouted from the flakes of rotten sleepers in front of a warehouse with pink graffiti on the walls and two small windows that watched Finn. He read the graffiti he passed on a corrugated-sheet wall, spray-painted in silver and sky-blue: ‘Moose’, ‘Kansas’, ‘Gas’, ‘Nerds’. He recognised apple buds and the horizontal slashes of cherry tree bark. Brittle, hoary grass framed a view below of the FedEx lot opposite Leo’s gallery. Tarnished and bitten by the winter, the grass was yellow and brown and copper and beautiful and cold, flown in from the Midwest in honour of the ghosts of the West Side cowboys who preceded the elevated trains. This wilderness had tended to itself while the city looked elsewhere.

  Finn hated himself for thinking it, but it seemed imperative that Dilly, and people like her, should never find this.

  He walked south on the lumpy, ragged tracks and the sleepers shone in the urban light against icy grey shingle. Thick, gnarly twigs stuck out at angles beneath the petrified relics of cow parsley, and at a bend above 18th Street he came face to face with a twenty-foot-high, shirtless, muscle-bound Armani male model. From forty feet below the ripped torso, tanned and glistening in the shadowy chill air, came the shrieks of laughter of four girls stumbling home in big heels and small skirts. Finn looked down at them as a giant would.

  He slept tucked against the girders, hugging himself to the illusion of shelter and warmth where the ivy was thick like a solid wall. He lay on his back, the huge cast-iron rivets mountainous to his eyes, and he felt happy. He listened to the whisper of the cool air rising off the Hudson and the miniature sleeping lives of a million New Yorkers drumming along the railroad lines and reaching his ear like a distant playground. He was safe. Stars appeared just before he slept and he was not sure if he was dreaming them. He remembered the small cupboard in his grandmother’s bedroom on the other side of the estate. He dreamed of the night she died, that he walked past her body and opened the small cupboard door and found rows and rows of shelves all full of toys and games. He walked for hundreds of yards to the end of the shelves and where they ended there was outer space, lit fluorescent by stars and planets.

  He turned in his half-sleep, pressing against the dollar bills in his front pocket, the touch of which and the open air afforded him a smile. Gentle vents of air swept along the line, reminding Finn of the silent murmurations of starlings above the Sussex Levels, the way they painted the sky inky grey. The vents came through like a slow train, symmetrical above the tracks, and he allowed one of them to usher him into the same deep, carefree sleep that his big brother was craving in the same moment.

  It irritated Jack, the sight of the five hundred dollars sitting in an envelope on his kitchen worktop. Sometimes, Finn made no sense to him. And, when Jack was sleepless, what he didn’t understand overwhelmed him.

  The list he had compiled of places to show Finn made him feel like an idiot now. Thank Christ he hadn’t stuck it to the fridge during his baby brother’s oh, so short stay. He had printed it out on company letterhead and it was a niggling embarrassment about that detail that had prevented him from pinning it up where Finn and his girlfriend could see it. He folded it now into his pocket and resolved to get something useful done, even though it was getting late. He slugged a dose of the cough medicine that was failing to make an impression on him and stood over the laundry basket waiting for another dizzy spell to pass. When it had, he was left with the thought of how constructive, how pleasing it would be to get his and Holly’s pile of home towels and sports towels washed. It was a sizeable pile, what with both of them being one-time towel users (no exceptions) and keen athletes.

  The netherworld of the basement laundry was deserted yet bore the sounds of human existence. The elevator shafts cranked and groaned here. Loose objects left in pockets chimed rhythmically. A door slammed somewhere distant, and the occasional, unfathomable noises that a high-rise building made of its own free will came and went with the same absence of explanation that had confounded many in Jack’s place before him. Sounds to shrug off. Through the pulsing green of a tired, failing, out-of-tune striplight, the clock on the wall read near enough ten-thirty. Jack examined each towel as he placed it into the drum of the washer – for what, he had no idea. He mixed the large bath towels with the small hand towels, layering them because he had read that this was the right thing to do. He had once noticed a ring of dirt on Finn’s collar as they walked to school and that evening found all Finn’s school shirts embedded with grime around the neck. He had washed them, woken even earlier than usual to dry and iron them, and from that point on had made sure to keep up Finn’s laundry so that his kid brother never stood out or got picked on.

  He wasn’t familiar with the night shift down here. Sunday mornings before the gym (Jack), tennis (Holly) and brunch (together) was their usual time in the dry heat of the basement, with the fabric softener smell and the drone of the machines and the scratched linoleum floors and the elderly in search of company, the aggrieved in search of respite from an unreasonable partner and the cute young roomies in hot-pants or pyjamas in search of something just a little bit less straight-looking than Jack, although he often got a second look. The night shift was different, the wall of sound from the unmanned machines louder (although that could have been Jack’s head cold), and greater the sense of being down among the intestines of a building buckling beneath the weight of the lives above.

  He came up for air during the wash cycle. He was exhausted and sat in a heap outside the building, and watched the lights of the Kinsale Tavern casting pools of orange on to the busy, hurry-home sidewalk, the Celtic signwriting above, the shapes of movement inside through windows heavy with condensation. The avenue was busy but behind him the lobby was quiet. The doorman was out back and no one was around. A man sat at a second-floor window above the tavern looking on to the street, lost in thought or perhaps listening to someone behind him that Jack couldn’t see, being told he was no longer wanted, being told how much he was adored, being told there was even more dog shit than usual on 96th Street today, told to wash the dishes, come to bed. Or maybe alone, after all; Jack couldn’t tell. The man was still, as still as Jack, and perhaps even more solitary. Jack hoped not. He had the capacity to worry about complete strangers, which in New York City was borderline unmanagea
ble.

  A Hispanic man stepped out of the tavern and took a look through the window next door at the state of the pre-cooked Tex Chicken. Jack watched him through the blur of people passing on the sidewalks and the streams of southbound traffic. Everything about everybody was noticeable to Jack because anybody might have been a clue as to how to live here, a pointer he could not afford to miss. In his country of birth, seeing a Hispanic-looking man hitch up his jeans while looking at a fast-food menu would not be noteworthy to him. But, here, still, three years in, he wondered who everybody was, where they went home to, what they worked as, how they survived, what page of the history book they appeared on. Every person Jack saw added to the overwhelming feeling New York City gave him, that there were far too many people here for it all to stick together. He rose to his feet and stepped to the kerb and looked south down the avenue, wondered again how it all could have been built so quickly. He sometimes lost his nerve at the thought of providing food and electricity and love for all these people, as if it were his job to do so.

  Topped up to his requisite levels of unbearable burden, he returned to the basement, stopping to read a flier freshly taped to the lobby noticeboard.

  www.snuggleup.com

  A HIGHLY PROFESSIONAL CUDDLING SERVICE. SNUGGLING, CUDDLING, CHAT, MOVIE DATES AND ALL ACCEPTABLE PLATONIC ACTIVITY.

  $50 PER HOUR MANHATTAN. $40 PER HOUR BROOKLYN, QUEENS, THE BRONX AND STATEN ISLAND

  It figured, Jack thought, that even a cuddle cost more on Manhattan.

  In the laundry room, a couple in their mid-forties taped Snuggleup fliers to the wall. Jack recognised them from the building. They were his precise image of Big Sur people or San Francisco, the sort of couple you noticed. They gave the impression of having wandered into Manhattan barefoot. They said hi to Jack and he said hi back and the man said, ‘Oh, poor you,’ as Jack’s ill-health could not be missed.

  Jack sat across from them, by his drier, feeling a hot prickling across his back and weakness in the legs. Through the noise of the machines he said, ‘Is that for real?’ and could hear his voice inside the clogged spaces of his own head without being sure he had spoken loudly enough to be heard.

  ‘Oh, sure. Absolutely,’ the man said.

  Jack pulled a face at the idea. The man smiled warmly and said, ‘That’s totally cool if you’ve got people you’re close with, but there’s a lot of disconnected souls out there.’

  ‘They don’t all have fifty bucks an hour.’

  ‘Most people living in this city have fifty,’ the woman interjected.

  Jack could not believe that was true, but he saw her point. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m being cynical and I don’t mean to be. Hypocritical. You should charge what people are willing to pay, same as we all do. It’s just a strange idea to me, paying to be held.’

  ‘We understand totally,’ she said, and smiled with her eyes. Jack looked at them – they were green – and tried hard to rally against the idea that just about everything in the universe was to do with sex, but eyes like hers made it hard to argue. ‘You’d be amazed how many people need this.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Jack said, ‘I’m amazed people can admit it.’

  There was buzzing in his ears from the legions of mucus encamped in his sinuses. It mixed seamlessly with the noise of the drier, and the more he looked at the couple, the more he wanted to drive through California with a partner who needed no persuading to be there with him. The couple were saying something else to him but the noise in his head was like a stage curtain between them, or the glare of the sun in dreams when it was impossible to open one’s eyes fully, so he smiled at them and nodded and turned to watch his drier.

  The man tore off one of the strips and handed it to Jack. ‘Website’s on there, man. You should have one.’

  ‘He should work for us, be a snuggler,’ the woman said, tilting her head to one side as she studied Jack.

  Jack made to laugh at this but got bent over by coughing instead. When he righted himself they had gone. He sat forward and dragged from his pocket the list of excursions he had made for himself and Finn, and mocked himself as he read it. One: the Circle Line. (Jack thought about it: this was an okay idea, a thoroughly safe start. Touristy but excellent, a complete overview of Manhattan with some staple highlights and a few surprises thrown in.) Two: a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. (Ditto. Safe. A sure thing, involving a physical activity – walking – to occupy them if conversation was stilted.) Three: the reading room in the public library. (A decidedly dubious idea, but the place meant a lot to Jack and he hoped it would to Finn too. Seemed unlikely, though, now that he saw it in print.) Next: a Knicks game at the Garden. (Another surefire hit, and maybe take him into the public library en route to the Knicks so that he’s distracted thinking about going to the game and doesn’t realise he’s in a library until it’s too late.) Five: Inwood Hill Park. (The geological gem, but who was he kidding? Scratch it.) Five: the Met. (Pushing it, but worth a try.) Six: the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. (Really reaching here, but so interesting and important. Or Ellis Island, if the ferry ride sells it to him – a ferry ride, what is he, eight?) Next: the Park, take a ball. (Safe bet.) Next: the Flatiron Building. (He would insist and Finn would get it once he saw it, from the angle on Fifth Avenue and Broadway.)

  Jack shook his head at the list. His idea of a good time was possibly no one else’s. Surely not Finn’s. He scrunched up the paper and threw it across the basement, straight into the bin. It didn’t touch the sides. He took pleasure in the perfection of his throwing arm (where were the nubile roomies and the green-eyed hippies when you wanted them to see you at your best?) and it released a playfulness in him which, along with his fuzzy head, prompted him to climb up on to the bench that was there for folding dry clothes on, and lay on his side. He rested his head in the palm of one hand, and fell asleep to the heat and metronomic drone of the drier.

  Finn was woken by the cold in the dead of night and lay still and watched the sky and thought of Jack holding his dad as he died on the roadside, and everyone calling Jack a hero for not allowing his father to die alone. He felt dry and sick in the mouth and then a tingle of heaviness coursed through his spine and drew him back down into deep sleep and the next thing he knew he was curled on his side, regaining consciousness in daylight. The sparrows were singing louder than the traffic on Tenth Avenue. He opened his eyes and watched the tip of a grass stalk staggering in the breeze, knocking against the spire of the Empire State Building. He saw the blue of grape hyacinth where his hands lay. He jumped to his feet and rubbed his face and walked to the side of the line. He gripped the railing and looked over at the grey, patchy Chelsea side streets. An optical trick on a somnolent mind made the drop to the street below seem like a mere step away, one moment, and then a mile high. He imagined the torture of being able to see a normal life far beneath you and not return to it, to know for sure that there was no going back, that your life had slipped beyond a tipping point towards death on a day that had started like all the others. Had his dad known for sure, as he stumbled along the roadside, that he was finished? Had he cared? Had he regretted that he would never see Finn again? When Jack arrived, had his dad wished that Finn were there too? It was the first time Finn had thought deeply about it. He had been adamant from day one that he’d not catch himself caring.

  He found a staircase near to where a beaten-up grand piano with chainsaw cuts and burns lay strewn among the weeds and he took the steps down to Little West Street and naïvely believed that the disused elevated railway line was his secret and he whispered to his brother, ‘I know something you don’t know.’

  Jack would never spend a night the way he had just done, Finn knew that, and, while it saddened him that his brother would be so alarmed by his doing those things that were as natural as breathing to him and which made so much more sense to him than many of the working parts of the world, it struck him that if he and his brother teamed up they would amount to one rounded, interesting individ
ual. He was going to have to discard a lot of this thinking, or his desire to give Jack a taste of life with Uncle Trevor back home would be beyond rescue.

  Leo and Astrid watched Finn mooch into the gallery on time but with the indelible mark of one who had slept rough. They stared, with almond croissants held up to their open mouths. The boy sat at the desk with them, shuddered once from the cold in his bones and picked up the third pastry, taking a large, predatory bite. He looked raw. His hair was rope, and defied gravity. There was grass on his clothes and the imprint of an industrial-sized rivet on his cherry cheek. Astrid sat forward and studied the visual information available to her.

  ‘Where did the little thief sleep last night?’ she asked, slyly.

  ‘Up on that disused railway line…’ Finn said.

  Leo stood up. ‘What! Why?’

  Finn shrugged. Astrid shook her head. She had long ago perfected the art of not being impressed by anything. She took a second bite of her croissant and pushed it away, out of her own reach.

  ‘You said you had a place to stay,’ Leo said. ‘The guy in prison. I remember details like that. If you lie to me, this doesn’t work.’

  ‘I have. I just liked it up there.’

  ‘It’s madness. People sleep in beds!’

  Astrid laughed at Leo’s distress and told him to calm down. Finn shrugged, confused by the fuss. ‘I liked it up there,’ he repeated.

  ‘Enjoy it before they feng shui it,’ Astrid said. She turned to Leo. ‘The eleven art history graduates you turned down would have slept under a roof last night, as well as being legally permitted to work.’ She was in one of her clipped, friendly, organised moods and by mid-morning she was deep in conversation with a public art space in Boston and Leo was being screamed at down the phone by the artist called Tilhoff, who was next to show at the gallery. Leo inched the receiver away from his ear. The further the receiver travelled, the clearer Finn could hear a raised voice down the line. By the time the voice stopped, Leo’s posture had buckled a little and he looked bored. ‘Does it really matter, Tilhoff?’ Leo asked. The line went dead. Leo smiled phlegmatically at Finn and put down the phone. ‘Never ask an artist if it really matters.’